The present invention relates to an apparatus for controlling the graphic or visual representation of the characters forming the words of a text in a type script using characters which have several possible graphic forms, e.g. a text in Arabic script.
The reproduction of an Arabic text involves a fundamental problem due to the fact that each Arabic character has several different graphic forms depending on its position in a word: an initial form when the character is the first character in the word, a medial form when the character is located between two adjacent characters, a final form when the character is the last character in the word and an isolated form when the character is not connected to other characters in the word. The table of FIG. 1 shows the different character forms in the classical Arabic alphabet. The latter comprises twenty-eight consonants, a number of vowel signs and some other orthographic signs. The classical Arabic script thus comprises a number of characters much exceeding the number of Latin characters used in the western scripts. Now the usual western typesetting technology cannot cope with such a high number of Arabic characters. For this reason it has been the usual practice in the printed Arabic texts to use the consonants and some long-vowel signs only and to neglect the short-vowel signs. This makes the Arabic texts unclear or at least ambiguous with the result that their understanding is uneasy and inaccurate. Such inaccuracy is incompatible with the reproduction of technical texts and practically impedes the standardized Arabianization of the technical terms.
A major problem to be solved is to make the reproduction of technical texts in Arabic typescript and the standardized Arabianization of the technical terms possible. The resolution of this problem is of prime importance to make the developments in advanced technology accessible to the Arabian peoples and to make the technological development possible in the Arabian countries.
A further problem with the Arabic texts concerns their transmission on telecommunication lines with a view to feed data terminal units. Up to now the binary words for the transmission of Arabic characters have required ten or eleven bits and a high resolution dot display matrix, which is expensive in operation and data processing time and in memory locations.